Former Afghani Yale student found not guilty of rape

NEW YORK – Saifullah Khan, a former Yale student of Afghani descent, has been acquitted of rape charges, after being accused of raping an undergraduate student in her dorm room at Trumbull College in 2015, according to multiple sources.

According to a Yale Daily News report, it took four hours for a six-person jury to acquit Khan on Wednesday, March 7.

According to a New York Times report, the unnamed woman stated in a complaint that she was sexually assaulted by Khan on Halloween in 2015 when she was attending an off-campus party with her friends, where she had several drinks and was intoxicated enough that she had lost her friends after the party.

Instead, she found herself with Khan, an acquaintance who was with her afterward and brought her to her room. Security camera footage showed the two of them walking back to her dorm, while she appeared to be leaning on Khan with her leg dragging slightly behind her.

The complaint further stated that she woke up in the middle of the night to find Khan on top of her and tried to push him off.

Even though she remembered going to sleep fully clothed, in the morning, she claimed that was naked, saw used condoms on the floor and bruising on her legs.

On Nov. 2, she visited the Yale Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center to report the incident where an administrator called the police.

Khan was suspended from Yale on Nov. 9, and officers arrested him on Nov. 12.

However, Khan gave a whole other story in court as he recounted the events of the night.

Khan said that she was the one who invited him to her room and took off her own clothes but then became angry at him.

Khan’s lawyers even asked the woman how much she had had to drink, how she decided to not remember certain details but remember the alleged assault itself and how her text messages showed that she had been flirting with Khan days prior to the incident.

According to the New York Times report, Norman Pattis, Khan’s lawyer, even said “what went on in the room that night made everyone uncomfortable, but it wasn’t a crime,” and Michael Pepper, the prosecutor said “the gaps in the alleged victim’s memory were proof that she had not made up the assault.”

“If she wanted to do that so bad, put a nail in the coffin, wouldn’t she have given you a more coherent story?” he asked the jury.

The woman rejected Pattis’s question of whether she was planning to file a civil suit against Khan or Yale, and instead said “I have nothing to gain by this. It’s been difficult reliving it the last three days.”

According to the College Fix, the first attempt to prosecute Khan in October collapsed in a mistrial because Yale police “had not given the defense notes from interviews it conducted with witnesses,” according to the Yale Daily News.

The extent of that failure was alleged in a defense filling about a month ago stating:

“Moments prior to the commencement of evidence [in October], the state notified defense counsel that the Yale Police Department had just discovered what amounted to 40 to 50 pages of notes which were disclosed to the defense shortly thereafter. … Having fully reviewed the notes and the circumstances of their disclosure, they raise the further questions about evidence that existed and may have been withheld, lost, or destroyed by the Yale Police Department, faculty, or administrators.”

Parikh Worldwide Media is the largest Indian-American publishing group in the United States. The group publishes five periodicals – “News India Times,” a national weekly newspaper; “Desi Talk in New York,” a weekly newspaper serving the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region; and “Desi Talk in Chicago,” a weekly newspaper serving the Greater Chicago area and the Midwestern states; and “The Indian American,” a national online quarterly feature magazine, and the Gujarat Times, a Gujarati language weekly. The combined circulation and readership of these publications make the media group the most influential in the ethnic Indian market.